Researching Corporate Social Responsibility Communication: Themes, Opportunities and Challenges

• Author: Andrew Crane,Sarah Glozer
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12196
• Published date: 01 November 2016
• Date: 01 November 2016

Researching Corporate Social Responsibility

Communication: Themes, Opportunities and

Challenges

Andrew Crane and Sarah Glozer

York University; Royal Holloway, University of London

ABSTRACT Growing recognition that communication with stakeholders forms an essential

element in the design, implementation and success of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has

given rise to a burgeoning CSR communication literature. However this literature is scattered

across various sub-disciplines of management research and exhibits considerable heterogeneity

in its core assumptions, approaches and goals. This article provides a thematically-driven

review of the extant literature across five core sub-disciplines, identifying dominant views upon

the audience of CSR communication (internal/external actors) and CSR communication

purpose, as well as pervasive theoretical approaches and research paradigms manifested across

these areas. The article then sets out a new conceptual framework – the 4Is of CSR

communication research – that distinguishes between research on CSR Integration, CSR

Interpretation, CSR Identity, and CSR Image. This typology of research streams organizes

the central themes, opportunities and challenges for CSR communication theory development,

and provides a heuristic against which future research can be located.

Keywords: communication, corporate image, corporate social responsibility, organizational

identity, social reporting, stakeholder engagement

INTRODUCTION

It is now widely acknowledged that responsible corporations should engage with their

stakeholders on corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues, and regularly communicate

about their CSR programmes, products, and impacts with concerned stakeholders

Address for reprints: Andrew Crane, Schulich School of Business, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto,

Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada (acrane@schulich.yorku.ca) and Sarah Glozer, School of Management, Royal

Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK (Sarah.Glozer@royalholloway.ac.uk).

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is

properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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C2016 The Authors

Journal of Management Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and

Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 53:7 November 2016

doi: 10.1111/joms.12196

(Du et al., 2010). This has included communication on products and in advertisements,

in corporate social responsibility reports, and also through stakeholder engagement ini-

tiatives. CSR communication is regarded as critical for everything from convincing con-

sumers to reward responsible companies (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2004), influencing

corporate accountability (Archel et al., 2011), to enabling managers and other stake-

holders to make sense of the world (Basu and Palazzo, 2008). As corporate responsibil-

ities have increasingly expanded due to heightened stakeholder expectations in a

globalized economy (Scherer and Palazzo, 2009, 2011), the way in which organizations

communicate with their stakeholders through CSR communication has become a sub-

ject of intense scrutiny. Interest in such phenomena has thus given rise to a burgeoning,

multi-disciplinary literature that has sought to reveal the role of communications of vari-

ous kinds between firms and their stakeholders in shaping CSR meanings, expectations

and practices (Basu and Palazzo, 2008; Bhattacharya et al., 2011; Swaen and Van-

hamme, 2005).

There is then, by now, a well-established literature concerned with CSR communica-

tion across management disciplines. Theoretical advances have been made in under-

standing how stakeholders can be informed, responded to, and involved in CSR

strategy construction and execution (Morsing and Schultz, 2006), while empirical

research has sought to ‘make sense of CSR communication’ (Ziek, 2009) in the context

of new communication technologies, diminishing traditional political influences, and

globalisation challenges that continue to change the face of corporate-stakeholder inter-

action (Scherer and Palazzo, 2009). At this critical conjecture, CSR communication is

in a ‘kind of transition’ (Schneider et al., 2007). That is, traditional, one-way CSR com-

munication tools are increasingly being complemented by ‘Web 2.0’ bidirectional and

symmetrical communication channels, which blur the boundaries between the senders

and receivers of CSR information and transform organization-stakeholder interaction

(Capriotti, 2011).

Given this shifting context, scholars have sought to understand how CSR communi-

cation can build legitimacy (Bebbington et al., 2008), support the development of trust-

ing relationships with stakeholders (Coombs and Holladay, 2012), communicate the

abstract and intangible characteristics of an organization (Schlegelmilch and Pollack,

2005), provide true and transparent information to an increasingly vocal stakeholder

movement (Podnar, 2008), and develop successful CSR communication campaigns that

exploit the web 2.0 tools such as blogs (Fieseler et al., 2010), websites (Capriotti, 2011)

and online discourse (Unerman and Bennett, 2004). However, the theoretical and prac-

tical impact of this work has thus far been limited by a highly fragmented literature that

is poorly integrated and lacks much by way of common assumptions, frameworks, or

theories.

All this suggests that CSR communication as a unified field is an embryonic notion

(Maignan and Ferrell, 2004; Morsing, 2006). Indeed, while much of the CSR literature

within management studies is conceptually related to the field of communication, e.g.,

disclosure, reporting, reputation, etc., there is not so much a distinctive or unified CSR

communication literature but rather a heterogeneous collection of literatures across dis-

parate areas of management scholarship (see Ihlen et al., 2011). This plurality means

that even basic questions such as ‘what is the purpose of CSR communication’ remain

1224 A. Crane and S. Glozer

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C2016 The Authors

Journal of Management Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd and

Society for the Advancement of Management Studies